


By Invitation

by weakinteraction



Category: Their Finest (2016)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-18
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-08-04 04:32:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,567
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16339886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/weakinteraction/pseuds/weakinteraction
Summary: Years after the War, Catrin seeks out Phyl again.





	By Invitation

**Author's Note:**

  * For [shopfront](https://archiveofourown.org/users/shopfront/gifts).



The invitation is a surprise. A pleasant one, to be sure, but a surprise nonetheless, and Phyl has not been used to surprises, these last few years.

It was different during the War, of course. There was shock and horror, of course, and so she always feels a stab of shame when she thinks it, but she remembers how _exciting_ it was too; the sense of the world rearranging itself, the way all the self-perpetuating systems that existed then -- the old boys' networks and the ministries and institutions -- were forced to change and change again, even as they were desperately trying to preserve themselves.

Now her life has settled into a steady pattern. Just as she had thought they would, the men came back -- not all of them, of course, and some of those who did come back were profoundly changed, but there were enough who more than anything else wanted things to go back to how they were to force at least some of the changes she'd experienced to be reversed. But she managed to parlay her wartime experience into a relatively senior role in Whitehall, just enough experience and proven ability to avoid being quietly shuffled away into a corner somewhere.

She even managed to get a couple of promotions, albeit much more slowly than some men she now worked with who'd joined years after her. Somehow -- she couldn't possibly imagine how -- no one making employment decisions seemed to be particularly worried that she'd be leaving any moment to start a family.

She's happy, as these things go. She has work that keeps her busy, colleagues who are mostly tolerable, friends who know everything, and the occasional ... dalliance.

But even so, the thick, almost parchment-like envelope, and the small embossed card it contains, represent an upending of the steady drumbeat of small certainties that mark out her new life.

A film premiere. Leicester Square. Tomorrow night.

Not the sort of thing she gets invited to any more.

A short handwritten note in a looping scrawl that she recognises, that brings an involuntary smile to her lips for just a moment: "I'd love it if you could come."

* * *

As she emerges from the Tube station, the atmosphere outside is, if anything, smoggier than the air that fills the tunnels.

She pulls her coat tight around her shoulders, as though to prevent the miasma from impacting on her, and makes her way to the Odeon.

An attendant quickly realises why she's here and escorts her away from the queues waiting to go in and up a short flight of stairs to where the party is being held. He takes her coat, revealing her exquisitely well-fitted dinner jacket ensemble.

A few people here recognise her; she makes small talk with some, nods across the room at others. Mrs Cole herself, though, seems to be nowhere to be found.

She's still only halfway through her glass of champagne when they're called in for the feature. When the attendant reappears with a tray for her to put it on, she finishes it quickly first; rationing might finally have ended, but "waste not, want not" is still a deeply ingrained habit.

* * *

Mrs Cole -- she is still using the name, it seems, and it is how Phyl became used to thinking of her -- is flitting around the room like a butterfly. Her dress is perfectly modest, in keeping with the frankly dour current fashion, but there are little hints here and there of the sort of styles Phyl remembers from before the war. Artfully done and very pleasing to the eye.

"Miss Moore, I'm so glad you could come," she says when she finally reaches her on her circuit of the room.

"Delighted, Mrs Cole," Phyl says.

"Oh, really, now, you must call me Catrin."

"Then you must call me Phyl," she replies.

"I'll try," Mrs Cole -- Catrin -- says. The adjustment is going to be difficult for both of them, Phyl thinks.

"I am very grateful to you for inviting me," Phyl says. "Genuinely. One doesn't get quite the same opportunities at Ag and Fish as one used to at the Ministry of Information."

"I thought it was Agriculture, Fish and Food now," Catrin says, displaying a knowledge of baroque reorganisations of government departments that even many of her colleagues struggle to keep up with. "Surely that must mean you get to go to fancy restaurants and such."

"It's in the offing, but not officially happened yet," Phyl says. "For now it's more likely to be Billingsgate Market. Or a Young Farmers function."

"I'm sure you're a big hit there, Mi-- Phyl." Catrin looks away for a moment, suddenly shy at having used her name, despite the invitation to do so. "So ... what did you think of the film?" she asks at length.

"The resolution was rather mawkish and sentimental," Phyl says, unthinkingly lapsing back into the sort of critique that she would have been involved in back in the war years. "Albeit in a well-executed type of way," she adds hastily.

She thinks for a moment that she has caused offence, but then Catrin bursts into laughter, a great peal of it that resonates around the room, making others turn and stare. "Do you know what, I thought so too. But the public wants what it wants." She looks Phyl directly in the eye as she says, "And I thought I saw you dabbing your eyes, once or twice."

Phyl purses her lips. "Must have been some cigarette smoke in my eye, that's all," she replies. But she discovers that a part of her is absurdly pleased that Catrin was paying such close attention to her reactions.

While they've been talking, another woman has walked up to the corner they're standing in; now that there's a momentary lull in the conversation, she pulls Catrin gently aside, whispers something in her ear. There's something in the way they look at each other, the casually intimate way the woman touches Catrin's elbow ... In another context, Phyl would be completely confident that she was interpreting their interactions correctly. But she had never imagined that Mrs Cole-- that Catrin--

"Is everything all right?" Catrin asks, voice filled with sincere concern.

She realises how distracted she must appear. "Oh no, it's nothing," Phyl says. "It's just been a week full of surprises for me, I suppose."

"I really have to go," Catrin says. "But it was really good to talk to you again." She turns back to look over her shoulder. "And to answer the question you didn't ask: just because I can see the point of men doesn't mean I can't see the point of women too," she says, eyebrow arched exquisitely.

* * *

Another invitation follows a week later. Rather different, this time: a simple handwritten note.

The intervening days have not passed idly, in Phyl's imagination at least. She has repeatedly found herself considering the new information that she has learned, re-evaluating many things. Did Catrin intend to turn Phyl's life upside down in this way?

From very early in their acquaintance, she admired Catrin's tenacity and lust for life. Any feelings of _attraction_ that she might have had early on, though -- and she would never seek to deny that Catrin was pleasing to the eye -- were damped down considerably by her, as it turned out wholly incorrect, assumption that they would never be returned.

She writes a brief note back by return of post.

When she reaches the address Catrin gave her -- which turns out to be a small tea shop -- Catrin is already sat down. She waves enthusiastically as Phyl walks over.

"It's not a fancy restaurant like you're going to start getting invited to very soon," she says, "but a girl's got to make her budget stretch the whole month, after all."

"I have to say, when I accepted your invitation, I didn't realise it would be just the two of us," Phyl says. She doesn't mention that she _hoped_ that it might be.

"What? You imagined me holding forth in a salon, like some _fin de siècle_ socialite on the banks of the Seine?"

"Why yes, of course, some sort of intellectual _salon_ ," Phyl says.

They talk easily for some time, about everything and nothing: catching up on what they've each been doing, discussing the small joys of foodstuffs unseen in years reappearing on the shelves, passing on news of their mutual wartime acquaintances

"You know, I was always sad that we lost contact after the war," Catrin says, reaching out and placing her hand over Phyl's.

The way she emphasises that word: "Contact." The feeling of skin against skin, just for a moment, as Catrin's fingers brushed ever so lightly against her wrist. The way her eyes widened with significance and meaning -- _eye_ contact.

Considering her profession, considering what she learned at the premiere, it must be deliberate, surely?

If there is any doubt left, it is quashed when Catrin says in a low voice, "There was another question you didn't ask."

"Indeed?"

"A more specific one." She looks at Phyl very seriously. "Imogen and I-- Well, let's just say I'm glad to have remained good friends."

When they get back outside, it has started to rain. Phyl doesn't have an umbrella -- unlike her, usually so pragmatic, to be so ill-equipped on such a changeable day -- so Catrin insists on walking her to the Tube station, even though it's half a mile out of her way. Even though she has to hold it up slightly too high for her own good, so that the hem of her coat gets soaked.

When they part at the top of the steps there's a moment when Phyl thinks that Catrin is going to kiss her.

It doesn't happen. But she spends the whole journey on the clanking train imagining what it would have been like, and beginning to wonder if Catrin was waiting for Phyl to kiss _her_.

* * *

A few days later, there's another delivery. A parcel this time, bulging and only barely fitting through the letter box.

She opens it, filled with curiosity, and discovers that it's a script. She used to handle hundreds of the things, but she's never come across one this thick before.

There's no byline, but within the first few pages she's certain who wrote it. Despite the leavening of humour, it's searingly personal. About a girl who grows up in the Welsh valleys, proud of her heritage but also desperate to escape, to see everything the world has to offer. Of coming to London in the middle of a war. Of the people she meets there. Of tragedy and triumph.

She's almost tempted to telephone work to make her excuses and stay at home until she's finished it. But that wouldn't be very Phyl-like, so she puts it carefully to one side to resume reading that evening.

When she does, she realises that the parts of the story that she knows are really not the whole of it. There are the other girls around her growing up, the confused feelings -- sometimes shared, sometimes not -- and then there's the life she makes for herself after the war. The young woman growing into herself, finding a way to make the world fit in with her rather than herself fit in with the world. It would all be at risk of being mawkish and sentimental, Phyl thinks with just a tiny twinge of guilt, if it weren't so _honest_.

She reads late into the night, sipping a whisky as she does so. It becomes obvious that one character -- one she fancies she recognises all too well -- has a far greater bearing on the second half of the story than their relatively short screentime -- were this ever to be made -- would suggest. Someone who inspired the heroine not to accept things as they were, but also someone whose shadow all the others who came later lived in. But it isn't the man patterned after Mr Buckley, whose tragic death cuts short a love affair that might or might not lead anywhere; it's the woman, who couldn't be any more clearly Phyl if Catrin hadn't changed the names at all.

* * *

The next day is Saturday. It isn't the post falling through the letterbox that Phyl hears as she's beginning her usual weekend morning routine, but a person knocking.

The knock is gentle, but firm enough to resound throughout the house, and by the time she reaches the hallway, Phyl has half-convinced herself that it's just going to be the postman with a parcel too big to fit through the letterbox. Another script, or perhaps the manuscript for a novel, an epic bildungsroman from an author who will do for South Wales what du Maurier did for Cornwall.

But her heart knows who it's expecting, and is not proven wrong.

For a long moment they stand, either side of the doorway, looking -- practically staring -- at one another, but neither speaking a word.

They both break the silence at the same time. "Mrs Cole, how good to see you," Phyl says, at the same time that Catrin's saying, "Is there any chance you're going to invite me in? Only it is a bit nippy out here."

Then they both laugh, and Catrin comes in, without, Phyl realises, her ever quite having formally invited her.

"Would you like a cup of tea?" Phyl says. "Coffee?"

"Tea sounds grand, thank you," Catrin says.

She follows Phyl into the kitchen. As she fusses with the kettle, Phyl is aware of Catrin behind her, like a presence that fills up more than just the physical space her body occupies. It's as though the kitchen has been transformed by her presence.

When she turns back around, she realises that Catrin has seen the script on the worktop. When she is sure that Phyl is looking in the right direction, she gestures at it, attempting "casual" but landing somewhere closer to "twitchy". She tucks her hair behind her ear and says, "So, I don't suppose you've had time to read it yet? What did you think?"

"It's somewhat overlong, for the cinema," Phyl says carefully. "And I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure what ... mainstream audiences would make of it."

"I'm not sure anyone would make it," Catrin says. "I mean, maybe in a decade or three, who knows?" She's babbling now, Phyl knows it, and knows that Catrin knows it, but the feeling in her heart that started with the knock at the door has transmuted into a certain knowledge that this is it, these next few moments are when her life is going to change. She's willing it to happen, but also frightened of breaking the spell by saying anything. So she waits. Eventually, Catrin says, "But that's not really the point, you see." She's looking at Phyl now, at an angle and through her eyelashes, but looking straight at her with great intensity.

"Ah," Phyl says, realising that she needs to give just a little more encouragement. She holds up the script. "This is an invitation too, isn't it?" She can feel that she is smiling broadly, quite without any conscious thought having gone into it, quite without any regard for propriety or decorum, or even her carefully maintained sang-froid.

"Well, the thing is, you see," Catrin says, "I was wondering if you might be interested in auditioning for a starring role in the sequel."


End file.
